When she did, she felt like a dried-up riverbed. Like packed, cracked dirt with no chance of ever being anything else. She stared blankly ahead, and wondered if she should run away again, if she should try to find the Lovari. She fingered the horseshoe around her neck. Maybe it wasn’t too late …
But then something silvery crept across her foot.
“Go away, Astro,” she said in a dull voice, without looking down.
“I’m not Astrophil. I’m Roshina.”
It was a tin mouse with a long tail and tiny paws. Petra saw Josef pushing aside bare tree branches. He walked steadily toward her. She didn’t move. He hunkered down beside her. “Petra, you’ve done a brave thing.”
She didn’t look at him. She rubbed at her tears.
“When your da’s less scared he’s going to realize that, too.”
“Scared?”
“When Lucie and Pavel returned from Prague and said they’d left you there with some make-believe aunt, we were very worried. Prague isn’t a place for a twelve-year-old girl on her own.”
“I’m thirteen,” she said sullenly.
“Thirteen.” He nodded. “Everyone rounded on Tomik. I don’t think he’s been let out of his room all this time you’ve been gone. He kept claiming that the only thing he knew was that you wanted to go to Prague.”
Petra had known she could trust Tomik not to reveal her plan.
“So I went to the city to look for you,” Josef said.
“You did?”
“Of course. Do you think we would have waited around until you came home, if you came home? What would you’ve done in our shoes?
“I asked the beggar children about you. I saw homeless, crippled, and mad children your own age. And I had to go home empty-handed, thinking the worst things. Don’t you understand that when your da’s upset the way he is, it’s because he’s still seeing all the things that we thought must’ve happened to you? Even though you’re here and alive and safe? He blames himself that you left in the first place.”
As Petra listened, she imagined how everything could have gone wrong. She had never let herself think about it before, because then she might not have had the courage to go through with her plan. But she understood now what it would have been like if she had been caught, thrown into prison, or hanged. She realized that this would have given her father misery on top of his blindness. She imagined what it would have been like if she had returned home, as triumphant as she had felt only an hour ago, and discovered that her father was dying from a sickness, or from worry, or from anything. Then everything she had done would have been for nothing.
“Let’s go back,” Josef said, and held out his hand.
She took it.
WHEN SHE WALKED into the Sign of the Compass, she could hear Dita and her father arguing. They stopped when they heard the door creak. Her father turned around. He wore no bandages, and his face was whole and cured. His silver eyes gleamed. “Petra.” He walked toward her and put his hand on her cheek. He looked into her face. “Now, that—” he started to say. He tried again: “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
Epilogue
PETRA HAD TO LIE IN BED for two weeks while she recovered from her fever. She wasn’t unhappy, however, for she had visitors.
Tomik, freed by his father, was at first thrilled to see Petra. The tin dog thumped her tail with fierce delight as she and Tomik stood by Petra’s bedside. Atalanta had grown into a hulking, bristling, sweet-tempered beast. The dog’s shoulders were powerful, but her slender flanks suggested that she might fill out even further. Oil dripped from her fangs as she wriggled her broad head under Petra’s arm. She drooled all over Petra’s pillow until it was splotched with grass-green stains.
Tomik proudly said that he had always known Petra would be able to accomplish what she had set out to do. He told her about his new inventions. Tomik had created an antidote to the Worry Vial’s flaw: a gel that coated the inside of the jar, just like Petra had suggested. Tomas Stakan’s gratitude had made Tomik’s virtual imprisonment at the Sign of Fire after Petra had disappeared a little more bearable. A little.
Tomik was impressed when Petra described how she had used his Marvels. “That much water?” he said. “I’ll have to fix that.” As he mused about how to do that, he looked at his friend’s tired face. A sudden awareness of how much danger Petra had faced without him rose in his heart, and awoke the seeds of unpleasant questions: Should he have gone to Prague with Petra? Would their friendship change because he hadn’t?
“Maybe you should leave it as it is,” Petra suggested. “Make the next Bubble just like the first. It was pretty useful.” She didn’t notice the shadow that changed Tomik’s expression. Astrophil did, but he remained silent.
David made her tell the story over and over again. Neel was his new hero, and he kept pestering his mother to make a red and gold page’s jacket for him.
Dita scolded Petra for talking too much, reading too much, staying up too late, and overall doing just about everything she could do to avoid getting better. Petra found herself breaking rules deliberately, just so Dita would complain that she’d have to check in on Petra every hour, since the girl clearly didn’t have the wits to take care of herself. The cousins played this game with each other, and Petra realized, perhaps for the first time, that they played it with love.
After his rare burst of eloquence, Josef went quiet again. He nodded at Petra if he passed by her room. He said very little, as if he were embarrassed for having said so much. But then, he was busy, for he had a lot of work to do as a laborer. During the winter months, there wasn’t much work related to farming, so Josef hired himself out. He did odd jobs, repaired houses, and took care of horses. He rode Boshena. She obeyed him willingly, and he didn’t ask too much of her, for they recognized that some affinity rested between them.
Petra’s father came by her bedroom several times a day. Although he was no longer blind, the family had decided that this should remain a secret from everyone but their closest friends, the Stakans. This meant that Mikal Kronos rarely left the house, and if he did, he had to wrap bandages over his face and pretend the need to lean on someone’s arm. He didn’t like to fake blindness. But he knew that word of his miraculous recovery could so easily reach the prince.